My aging iPad has been a thorn in my side for the last month, and yesterday while I was co-working with a friend at a local coffee shop, it did everything in its power to tell me that it is time to find a replacement. Even doing something simple like checking Facebook was making the poor thing lock up, and at one point I found myself connecting my Bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone 5 so I could continue to be somewhat functional, since I had already had to reboot the iPad three or four times when it would randomly lock up.

It is possible that my iPad knows that Apple will announce upgrades tomorrow? I am sure it is just a coincidence…

Here is the link for tomorrow’s announcements scheduled for 10 a.m. Pacific Time: www.apple.com/live/

Apple is due to unveil an updated version or two of its iPad tablet on Oct. 16, and I will post my thoughts about it when it arrives, but I wanted to point out this post from Gizmodo today that offers a great use-case for the Surface tablet:

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Review: The Ultimate Outdoor Computer?

The article makes an effort to follow through on Microsoft’s marketing of the Surface Pro as a competitor for the MacBook Air, but it fails to make any meaningful comparison to using an iPad Air with a keyboard in the same manner. Regardless, this may be useful information for some people. I know that if I needed to buy a Windows-based machine right now, I would consider whether a Surface Pro could meet my needs.

One of my favorite blogs right now is a dead simple but brilliant site called The Setup. The premise of the site is simple – profile interesting, creative people and the tools they use to get their work done. The author offers one or two updates each week, all in a similar format, and each post covers the kinds of hardware and software that people use to complete their work, along with a closing question and answer about what would be the dream work setup for each person profiled.

If you like to get inside the minds and habits of creative people, I recommend checking it out.

I will admit that I followed today’s announcements from Apple at the WorldWide Developer Conference in California more closely than normal, because I am considering upgrading my go-to computer equipment – which is currently an 11-inch MacBook Air from 2010. With my circa 2006 MacBook Pro disassembled and a decision on the line about whether it is worth repairing it and continuing to put important data on such an old machine, it may be time to upgrade.

What did I learn today? Here are my highlights of what Apple announced and what those announcements could mean for businesses:

• Developers have now been paid more than $10 billion for the sale of their apps through the Apple App Store. What this means for businesses – if you are the creator of apps, the answer is obvious, but the message that this sends to app developers may be what matters most for businesses who use all of those apps. This means there is a financial motivation to continue innovating and creating new apps.
• All new MacBook Air lineup – This is the news that most interests me. I will carefully consider whether a new lightweight machine with a battery that will last even longer would be a good thing for my work. The new machines offer new processors that are much more efficient in how they use battery power, boosting the claimed battery run time of the 11-inch MacBook Air from the current five hours to nine hours and the claimed battery run time of the 13-inch MacBook Air from seven hours to 12 hours.
• New Airport base station – This is important because of the new high-speed variety of wi-fi that Apple has rolled into the new MacBook Air machines.
• Mac Pro – This was announced, but it won’t actually be available until sometime in the fall of this year. If your business does a lot of video editing or processor-intensive work, the new Mac Pro could be something you will want to be aware of when more details become available later this year. The impact for business now is minimal, unless you decide to delay buying a new high-end desktop machine to see what the final product will look like later this year.
• iOS 7 – Some of the changes in the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads could be helpful for businesses. Although most of the focus of the new iOS focus on simplification and visual changes, some of the key updated features that could help business are better multitasking and automatic updates of your apps. The system is not supposed to be released to anyone other than software developers until sometime this fall.

Here is what other folks are saying about some of the announcements:

• Lifehacker on the changes coming in iOS 7 later this year

Twitter has been hard at work over the last few months making TweeDeck less and less useful, so it comes with little surprise this morning that I received a notice that the connection between TweetDeck and Facebook will be severed on May 7. This is not really bad news. There are other tools that offer combined views of Twitter and Facebook content, and TweetDeck is only a useful tool now if viewed through the Google Chrome browser these days anyway. But if you rely on TweetDeck to keep track of both services, it’s now time to consider the alternatives.

Every few days I see interesting content about communications and marketing pop up on Twitter that can easily be missed if you aren’t looking at the exact right time. So I am going to start posting the hashtags for these conversations, so you can get the best content even if you can’t watch it unveiled in real time.

If you don’t know how to use hashtags, it’s simple. Just log in to www.twitter.com and type the hashtag into the Search field. Or you can just click the URLs I post to go directly to the conversation.

Here is what I am seeing today:

– #infinitedial – twitter.com/search?q=%23infinitedial – posts about how social media is positioned in relation to traditional media, especially the ongoing value of radio and listeners who consume radio broadcasts in their vehicles.

It’s time that I share one of my favorite weekly blog reads – a compilation of links gathered and updated every week on The Pen Addict blog. Why? For one, because I have always liked and used fountain pens. I use them much less now that I do much of my note taking on my iPad, but I still like fountain pens, inks and high quality paper. Stationary geek – I am sure very few are surprised.

But there are other reasons I like the weekly compilations like this post from last week. As I browse through the links, I am often exposed to the work and creative habits of other interesting people.

An example from last week’s compilation – a profile of software developer and author Mike Fogus and how he works, with details about everything from his computer setup to the way he takes and accesses notes.

The Internet and blogs in particular make it easy to keep learning, and a great way to find intriguing new ideas is to get a look inside how other people work. At least that works for me. Reading about smart people, just like working with smart people, is one of the best ways to keep a fresh perspective and to keep learning.

How safe are the passwords for your social media accounts? This question was on many minds late last Friday when Twitter announced that it detected an attack on its tool and that up to 250,000 accounts could be compromised. I received an email notice from Twitter while I was out on a run, and as soon as I came home I logged in to Twitter through the website – not trusting to click on a link in an unexpected email for fear that it could be a phishing attack. Sure enough, my account was one of the lucky few, so I created a new password and moved on with life.

This seems like a minor inconvenience, a tiny blip in another week of communicating through online tools. And for me, it was a minor blip, because I was prepared.

What do you need to do to be prepared?

• Use unique passwords for each of your important social media accounts – if you use the same password for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other accounts, when your password may be compromised on one tool, it is compromised on all tools.
• Use strong passwords that cannot be easily guessed by anyone trying to access your account – strong passwords are usually eight or more characters long and they use a combination of upper and lower case letters as well as numbers and symbols.
• Regularly change your passwords – it is a good practice to change your password every few months to make it even less likely that someone could crack the password and get access to your accounts.
• Limit the number of outside tools that have access to your social media accounts

– you can limit your exposure and the chance that someone can get access to your password by limiting the number and types of add-on tools that you connect to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Make it a regular practice to do a periodic review of the third-party tools connected to your accounts to ensure that you are only allowing key tools to maintain access to your login and password.

In the case of last week’s issue with Twitter, it isn’t clear if the reason those 250,000 accounts were compromised was due to poor passwords. Since one of my accounts was on the list, I would like to think that wasn’t the case.

Are your social media accounts and their passwords safe? If you rely on social media tools to tell your stories, this is a critical question. It’s up to you to ensure that the answer is yes.